Cool people you should know: Linda Renzulli

A charter school scholar to keep an eye on is Linda Renzulli, a sociologist at the University of Georgia. Renzulli has written a number of papers on the social and political conditions that influence the founding of charter schools, and you can find her papers here. She's currently working on a study comparing teacher satisfaction in charter and traditional neighborhood schools.

Cool findings:

• In her study of the state-to-state diffusion of charter school legislation, Renzulli found that states were more likely to pass their own charter school legislation (between 1991 and 1999) when neighboring states already had charter legislation.
  

• In another study, Renzulli found that the number of nonreligious private schools in a county was a strong predictor of the number of applications submitted to open charter schools, i.e. counties with more nonreligious private schools have more charter school applications.